Unofficial news and tips about Google

August 12, 2011

Show Fewer Gmail Conversations

If you've ever wanted to see less than 25 conversations on a page in Gmail, you'll be glad to know that it's now possible to do that. Just go to Gmail's settings page and select 10, 15 or 20 from the drop-down "Show [x] conversations per page". Until now, the only options were 25, 50 and 100.

The new options are useful if you don't receive too many messages or if you want to improve Gmail's performance. Gmail loads a lot faster if it only has to fetch 10 conversations instead of 25.

I really get irritated when I see new features like this coming to Gmail. Over the years, I've seen that Gmail's features are more gee-whizz I'm a top Stanford grad, so what amazing feature can I think of that no one else would think of, and when they see it they'll all marvel at how amazing Google engineers are.

From a practical viewpoint, it does not affect our daily use of Gmail whether we display 10, 15 or 25 emails.

It would not affect me so much, except that Gmail has left out a lot of functionality that other email clients have that would make life a lot easier for users:

e.g.

1) the ability to assign a label at a the time of creating the email. Instead, now we have to send email, go to sent folder, open email, and then add label.

2) the ability to set a future date and time to send an email. Imagine you've written a Google Apps work email, writing at 2am, and you don't want to send it at that time, because your clients will think you're a workaholic and have no control over your life (that's another issue). Or you want to send an email to someone that needs to be sent later. Now, you write the email, save the draft, and have to use some other reminder system to remind you to send the email. MS Outlook has that.

3) The ability to assign a different label to separate emails within a thread. Why, after so many years, does Gmail's labels - as they appear in the webmail - still not fully correlate with how those emails appear in IMAP when used in email clients such as Outlook and Apple Mail. WIth Gmail's web interface, as long as emails have the same title, they're all in the same conversation, but that does not equate to all those emails appearing in the same IMAP folder in Outlook or Apple Mail.

All these are basic, non-fancy, functional features that would make life a lot easier for people that use Gmail for serious stuff such as work and administration.

Therefore it REALLY IRKS me that Gmail engineers are playing around, trying to out innovate each other, and come up with some amazingly whopee features.

A few year ago, a senior Google engineer left the company, and did an interview saying roughly the same thing.